So Marge had magnanimously agreed when their probation officer had asked if there was any chance they’d be able to work at the library to fulfill the terms of their service.
She wanted to have the basement redone, starting with the back wall, which was suffering from an acute case of mold and rot and needed to be torn out and rebuilt.
“I said I’d bake you a cake and I completely forgot,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. P,” said Jerry, a smallish man with a face like a ferret.
“No cake?” asked Johnny, his partner in crime. He was a very large man with a perpetually dumb look on his large, square mug.
“I’ll bake you one tonight,” said Marge. “I promise. I had this sudden urge to clean out the attic this morning, and totally forgot about your cake.”
“Don’t sweat it, Mrs. P,” said Jerry. “Tomorrow is fine.”
She studied the wall with interest. “And? Have you discovered the source of that rot?”
“Nah, not yet,” said Jerry, who looked a little jumpy, Marge thought. “But we’re getting there, isn’t that right, Johnny?”
“Oh, sure, we’re getting there, Mrs. P,” said Johnny.
“Marge, please,” she said.
“Probably a neighbor with a leak in his bathroom,” said Jerry.
“Yeah, probably a leak,” said Johnny.
“Or bad plumbing.”
“Yeah, bad plumbing,” Johnny echoed.
“Well, I’ll leave you boys to it,” she said. “Yell if you need anything, all right?”
“Will do, Mrs. P—Marge,” said Jerry.
“No cake, Jerry,” she heard Johnny tell his friend as she started walking away. “I was really looking forward to that cake.”
“Oh, shut up, you moron. How many times do I have to tell you? You talk too much.”
“But, Jerry!”
“You talk too much!”
“But I like cake!”
“Shut up!”
And as she mounted the stairs, she told herself not to forget about that cake this time. Johnny obviously had been looking forward to it. He and Jerry might be criminals, but they were clearly well on the road to rehabilitation, and she’d decided she would do her bit to help them become upstanding citizens once more.
The two men had actually broken into Odelia’s house not so long ago, and had been caught red-handed by Odelia’s cats. But Marge believed in letting bygones be bygones, and in the power of forgiveness. So it was with a warm heart that she’d welcomed the two former crooks into her library.
And as the clanging and the banging resumed, she soon forgot about the basement, and her thoughts returned to Jock Farnsworth, and Jock’s wife Grace. It had been, what, thirty years now? And for no particular reason she found herself wondering how Jock was doing, and Grace. She knew they had a daughter, and she thought the girl would be twenty now. And as she found her mind incapable of staying away from the topic of her ex-boyfriend and his family, suddenly her own daughter walked in, looking solemn.
“Odelia? What’s wrong, honey?” she asked.
“Do you remember we were talking about Jock and Grace Farnsworth this morning?”
“What a coincidence! I was just thinking about them!”
“Well, Alicia Farnsworth dropped by the office just now. She thinks something happened to her mother and wants me to investigate.”
“Something happened to Grace? What do you mean?”
“She’s gone—disappeared. Jock claims she left with her boyfriend, who’s also disappeared, but Alicia claims her mother would never go off without telling her, and she has a feeling something must have happened to her. Something bad.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Yeah. Could you do me a big favor, Mom, and introduce me to Jock? Maybe smooth the path a little? He won’t be happy when he learns his daughter went behind his back and asked me to investigate his wife’s disappearance.”
Marge hesitated. “I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea, honey. Jock and I… it’s been a long time, and we didn’t exactly part in an amicable way.”
“But like you said, it’s been a long time, and you have spoken to him since, right?”
“No, I haven’t, not really. Oh, sure, I’ve seen him and Grace in town, but we’ve never spoken. He broke my heart, Odelia, and I was really upset for a very long time. I thought he was the one, you know, and then he met Grace and it turned out I wasn’t the one for him. Grace was.”
“Not anymore she’s not.”
“You say she was having an affair?”
“Yeah, with an artist who lives in a cottage on the domain. Guy called Fabio Shakespeare.”
“I think I’ve heard of him. Specializes in portraits?”
“Specializes in seducing rich married women, apparently.”
Marge thought for a moment, then decided that maybe this was a good opportunity to finally leave the past behind. And patch things up with Jock once and for all.
“You’re right,” she said. “It was a long time ago. And maybe it’s time to finally forgive and forget. When do you want to do this?”
“How about now? Can you close up the library for a couple of hours?”
“I could, but I’ve got an even better idea.”
Chapter 8
“We need recruits,” said Harriet, who’d now really and truly taken command of our new association. “We need every cat in Hampton Cove to educate every dog. It’s the only way. Otherwise this is going to take forever.”
“You know, you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything,” said Shanille, “but I have to admit you’ve really taken this dog doo business well in paw, Harriet.”
“I think it’s important, Shanille. I think this may very well be the most important issue of our time. It touches on so many aspects of our lives: hygiene, discipline, respect for our fellow cats… If we can’t fix this, we need to ask ourselves who we are as a nation, you know?”
“She’s taking this really serious, isn’t she?” asked Brutus, a note of worry in his voice.
I understood where he was coming from. Harriet has a tendency to get carried away with any project she takes on, and this was one project she was digging her teeth into.
“If she keeps this up she’s going to antagonize every last dog in town,” Brutus said, “and then the streets won’t be safe for us to walk on.”
It was an aspect of the matter I hadn’t considered. There exists a very fragile peace between cats and dogs. The kind of peace that can be torn apart by a rash act like trying to coerce every dog into adopting the feline way of disposing of their doggie doo.
“Rufus took it pretty well,” I said.
“Rufus is a nice dog,” said Brutus. “A sweet mutt. But not all dogs are like Rufus, and if Harriet starts ruffling feathers, there’s no telling what might happen.”
“Don’t you mean ruffling dog hairs?” asked Dooley.
Brutus decided to ignore Dooley’s contribution. “Dogs may revolt. Turn on us en masse,” he said, painting an apocalyptic picture of a war between cats and dogs.
“Maybe you should tell Harriet to take it easy?” I suggested.
“Have you ever tried to tell Harriet anything? She isn’t one for taking things easy. She’s a can-do cat who doesn’t believe in taking prisoners.” He sighed. “Let’s just see what happens. Maybe Gran will be able to talk some sense into her.”
“I don’t know…” I said. Asking Gran to talk sense into someone is probably like asking a pyromaniac to put out a fire.
We’d arrived at the doctor’s office and now stepped inside. As I had suspected, Gran was seated behind her desk, but instead of playing Solitaire on her computer, like she usually does, she was busily typing away, twin red splotches on her cheekbones a testament to her excitement.
“Hey, Gran,” said Harriet as we walked behind the desk.
“Hey, you,” she said without looking up or taking a break from typing.
“We have a proposition for you,” said Harriet, not deterred by Gran’s obvious lack of interest in our presence. “We want you to join our newly formed association.”